I had a "Superman" marathon not to long ago were I watched them all, starting with the first one and ending on "Batman vs Superman." I felt liked the first two hold up very well and that is even including the fact that Superman doesn't even really have a huge fight scene in the first one. To me the movie's understood the nostagic value of the character and embraced that. To me that is what most of the Marvel movies have done , just with better special effects because like the first Superman the villians of those films also tend to feel like they don't matter to the success of the films.
Jason
I must say that I'm going to break this down to how the Christopher Reeve movies are versus the recent DC movies. But don't forget that before Christopher Reeve was on the big screen as Superman, both Kirk Alyn and George Reeves had played Superman on the big screen.
But for the Reeve's films from the 70's/80's, aside from Superman 2 in either form (at least the Donner cut from 2006 is better than the original Richard Lester Cut of the 1980's) and
Supergirl (which I'm going to say is more from the way it was marketed than it was originally shot and edited), 1, 3 and 4 are still the Superman films that I look to as the definitive ones. Seriously, I now that people laugh off 3 & 4, but at least 3 & 4 were more interesting to watch than the trash that has come out since 2006 with
Superman Returns, Man Of Steel & Superman vs. Batman. All three recent movies have had snore-bore stories (and seem to be more about the CGI than the story), and MOS I still haven't gone back to view anything past the 1hour, 10 minute mark, as it was just boring. And
Superman Vs. Batman, I kept walking out of the room as the Blu-Ray was playing the "extended edition", and really I found that with the extended edition, they needed to trim the movie down to about 45-50 minutes, rather than extending it to the, what? 2.5 hour length it was released at? I can tell you right now that I have absolutely no plans to see the new
Wonder Woman film in theaters, and whether I pick up the Blu-ray, well I might just go for the DVD, or wait till some TV station is airing the film to see it. Now then if a theater was playing the Reeve's films, yeah I would go and see them on the big screen!
As for the Reeve's movies versus the 1980's/90's Batman series, the 1989 Batman was way up there and could be compared to
Superman 1, while
Batman Returns was way better, with more interesting criminals than
Superman 2. Compared to
Superman 3 & 4,
Batman Forever and Batman & Robin are about the same.
The Dark Knight Trilogy was probably the closest to the Reeve's films to come out from DC in the last 20 years. The balance of story vs. sfx/CGI was okay.
As for the Marvel films vs the Christopher Reeve
Superman's, I can tell that the producers were using the first Superman as a place to start from, in terms of developing the characters, especially in the case of
Iron Man,
Thor,
Ant-Man and
Doctor Strange, where the general public were not that familiar with those characters, compared to the Hulk, Spider-Man and the X-Men. The Hulk, people still remember the 70's live-action series, and even in the 90's I remember seeing ads with the 70's Hulk on TV for insurance, plus the live-action Spider-Man series of the 70's was also remembered by some people, but a lot of people still think back to the 60's cartoon as well, just like in the 90's the X-Men cartoon really got a ton of people, both kids and adults, introduced to the X-Men. Plus in the 90's the line of Marvel Adult novels featuring Spider-Man and the X-Men helped adults get introduced to the Marvel universe---sure the novels did feature Iron Man and the Hulk and other Marvel characters, but when you look at the overall line, Spider-Man and X-Men really ruled the line.
That's for the Marvel Cinematic Universe films (which I realize that the X-Men are not apart of), but even with Fox's
X-Men series, while there have been hits and misses, the series has been interesting---I won't say that its as good as the Reeve's films from the 70's/80's, but its been pretty good.
The Fantastic Four I haven't even watched because none of the movies have interested me. And the Spider-Man movies, while the original trilogy from 2002 to 2007 was as good as the Christopher Reeve series, the
Amazing Spider-Man series I just found to be really stale. It wasn't as bad as the recent DC movies that I was talking about above, but compared to the first trilogy or even the Reeve series, I just didn't feel that it was good, and the CGI was horrible.
